


Don't Speak

by kerothyn



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Canon-typical language, Consent, Gen, M/M, Queerplatonic relationship, Reunions, Stimming, Team “Give Zelda a Promotion”, actually autistic Quentin Coldwater, because that could explain why they have issues with where to shelve books, chosen family, does anyone at the Library of the Neitherworlds or Underworld have their MLS/MSLIS, it's called cataloging people, spoilers through the promo for 4x12
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-10
Updated: 2019-04-10
Packaged: 2020-01-11 04:41:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18423015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kerothyn/pseuds/kerothyn
Summary: The Physical Kids plan how to rescue their friends from the Monster. Canon-compliant through the teaser for S4E12.





	Don't Speak

The first time Alice kissed Quentin, when he was switching bodies back from talking to Mayakovsky in the past, Q could brush it off as confusion over timelines. Past Quentin liked, more than liked, Past Alice. Past Quentin didn’t know this Alice wasn’t his Alice. She probably just got caught up in the moment, he rationalized.

The second time, though. The second time, he couldn’t think of an excuse. 

Quentin pulled back immediately. “Alice! Do you not get that that’s not okay?” 

Alice bristled, her face hardening. “You wanted it.”

His face scrunched up. “Past me, maybe. But you- you know this is over. We were never good together, no matter how hard I- *we* tried.” He scooched back from the barstool and took a step back, pulling his too-short hair into some semblance of a ponytail with the elastic he kept on his wrist. “Just… don’t. And save the excuses.” He reached a hand out to block her as she tried to step towards him again, and then he turned to leave. “I’ve, uh, got to go work on this spell. If I miss our chance to save Eliot, I think Margo might just use those axes on me.” He laughed nervously for a moment, hands shaking, picking up a book from the counter as he walked away.

(There’s a reason their garbage fire of a relationship ended with Eliot’s dick in his mouth.)

*

“Shoes off the couch, Coldwater,” Margo chided, pushing Quentin’s knees down from where he’d drawn them up under his chin before reaching a hand to rub a circle on his back. “Family meeting,” she called out. Margo pulled the glass from Quentin’s hand and set it on the table in front of him as the others began to join them in the sitting area of the apartment. “So where the fuck are we on getting Eliot and Julia back, huh?”

Quentin bit his thumbnail. “I think we can safely assume that the Monster’s got his sister in Julia’s body at this point. Assuming your axes can get them out, we have to have a place to put them.”

“It’s not just Eliot and the Monster in his body, and Julia and his sister in her’s. Eliot’s got that dude from Blackspire and all sorts of creatures running around in there too,” Penny explained.

“How many?” Margo started counting the jars in front of her.

“I have no idea. But a lot.”

“And how do we separate them, so we know Eliot and Julia get their bodies back?”

“I may have a way,” Alice cut in. “When we were trying to get the fourth key back from the Underworld, we used a mirror bridge to get in. On our way out, Harriet and Victoria got stuck. Now, I don’t know what happened to Victoria, but Harriet ended up in the mirror world in pieces. I got her put back together. Maybe we can use the mirror world to split them all apart?”

Over in the gold chair, Zelda frowned. “Using the mirror realm to trap monsters would *not* be recommended. It’s not a jail.”

“It’s where the Binder was trapped.” Alice tilted her head at Zelda accusingly.

Zelda tilted her head in response. “Everett will find out. Libraries run on information, and there’s only so much that my colleagues and I can do before he knows.”

Kady looked up. “We have to take out Everett.” Eyes turned towards her. “The ambient’s lower than the library’s saying, and Everett’s the one behind the attacks on the hedges. Two birds with one stone. We bring the hedges in and take the fight to him. Penny, how many people do you think you can bring with you at once? Zelda, could you get us in?”

“You want to bring the hedges in to fight *in* the library?” Penny asked, dubious.

“What part of that sounds bad?”

“The part where you’re dead. You really think that plan is survivable?”

“No, but if I sign a library contract, I end up in the Underworld branch and at least then I won’t have to look at a face I love on a person I don’t anymore.”

*

There was a certain stillness in the vestibule of the Library of the Neitherlands, a stillness born of waiting, a silence that is only ever a placeholder for profound sound and motion a moment later. The stillness and silence was broken, as it invariably must be, by the arrival of the throng of magicians and hedge witches intent on a mission of glorious chaos.

Kady and the hedges were the first to split off from the rest of the group. Their plan was to cause a commotion, distract librarians, cause mayhem without destroying any of the books. Essentially, they were there to be magic-wielding assholes. Through the library they scattered, pulling books off shelves, shouting, setting off smoke bomb spells, and asking as many annoying questions of roving reference librarians as they could. Zelda’s guerilla revolutionaries played along, calling in their supervisors for backup, hoping that it would be enough to entice Everett out of his office to handle the situation personally.

One of the hedge witches split from the rest; he was filled with righteous anger. “I demand to speak with a manager!” he bellowed into the ether of the library, stomping towards the administrative area. Everett emerged as junior librarians tried to hush the interloper.

“What seems to be the problem,” Everett asked in an attempt to pacify this man, this patron he’d never seen before and, frankly, hoped to never see again. He tried to suppress his sigh when he saw the star and keyhole tattoos on the man’s - hedge’s - arm. This was why he’d gone into special libraries and not the public sector. 

“What the fucking hell are you doing with this cataloging system? It’s a shitshow and an embarrassment. How the fuck is anyone supposed to find anything when you don’t have consistent cataloging and metadata policies. ‘Disprovable theories of time travel’? ‘Side characters’? Do you even have an ILS? I mean, yeah, multiverse and dragons and stuff but holy fuck is your shit disorganized!”

Everett looked the man up and down. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” He gestured, and the hedge disappeared. He turned around and shook his head, looking for Zelda.

Zelda, meanwhile, was setting up the magicians in her office, feeding them surges of magic as they started summoning the Monster and his Sister to the Library. Quentin made sure Alice, Josh, and Margo were all set before leaving to lure the creatures possessing his two best friends into their carefully (hastily) thought-out plan. Penny opened the jar of his blood that they’d prepared earlier, and started drawing sigils on Zelda’s mirror with a paintbrush. That was her cue to find Everett.

Zelda took a moment to breathe and press her hands down her torso before arranging her face in her usual calm acceptance expression, body open with hands held out and waiting. She exited her office, hoping it was the last time she’d do so as anything other than the new Head Librarian (long may she reign).

Seeing her down the hall as she stepped out from her office, Everett stalked over to complain about the hedge to Zelda. “Where were you? There are nutcases everywhere, and I had to ban some idiot who had the gall to complain about disorganization! You’re supposed to be handling this, Zelda,” he complained. “How did a hedge witch even get in here in the first place? They don’t have the resources to travel off-world.”

“Maybe he had help,” Zelda offered.

“If he had enough help to get here, he has the power to destroy everything.” Everett looked displeased, if not a little concerned.

“Let’s talk about this in my office,” suggested Zelda. She guided him around, risking a glance up at Quentin where he was stationed further down near the stacks, and saw Quentin’s eyes travel to his right.

Quentin waited to draw Monster Eliot and Monster Julia to Zelda’s office. If this didn’t work, they’d all be dead, and the only question would be who’d kill them first, the creatures or the librarians. This had to work. His face hardened into a mask of resoluteness. 

Fogg was set up to force the monstrous siblings in a certain direction. Quentin gasped, however, when he saw who was right behind the Dean. What Christopher Plover, beloved children’s fantasy author and notorious pedophile, was doing in their plan, he had no earthly (or unearthly) idea. As soon as Fogg shot off a magic missile, Quentin took off for Zelda’s office. “Tag, you’re it!” he called to the monster in Eliot’s body. Fogg and Plover raced after him.

When Quentin reached Zelda’s office, Margo handed him the bandolier of jars in which they were hoping to trap the invading creatures. Everyone jumped through as the monsters entered, leaving Margo with her axes to be the last piece of bait to make sure they came through the mirror with them. “Come and get me, dickwads,” she taunted before jumping into the mirror at last, an unsaid prayer on her lips that this would work, a promise whispered to an hallucinogenic lizard vision that she would get him back. Margo tucked and rolled into the mirror library, unsheathing the Sorrows axes and hurling them like they were gods-touched throwing knives into the monsters the moment they cleared the portal.

Instead of the red mist of the desert spirits, what emanated from Eliot and Julia’s bodies were clouds of ethereal golden lights, reminiscent to Alice’s Niffin memory of the pretty lights of a dying lamprey. The smaller, weaker lights found their way into the glass jars, but the two larger, strongest, solidest lights searched for new hosts and found their answer in Plover and Everett.

Quentin, Alice, Josh, Margo, Dean Fogg and Zelda formed a circle around the bodies of the now-possessed Christopher Plover and head librarian. Q had a hard time feeling sorry for those two, with all the destruction they’d wrought on their own, as humans. Hands moving in complicated patterns, their voices rose up, chanting, beseeching, commanding through the Incorporate Bond spell. 

_“Glaoim ort agus ceanglaím thú san áit seo agus ag an uair seo. Déanaim toghairm ort agus ceanglaím thú mar sin ní dhéanfaidh tú aon dochar. Toghairim thú agus déanaim ceangal ort leis an domhan scátháin seo. Anseo beidh tú agus fanfaidh tú anseo. Ghlaoigh na déithe thú uair amháin, agus bhí siad gafa uair amháin eile. Glaoim ort agus ceanglaím thú san áit seo agus ag an uair seo. Déanaim toghairm ort agus ceanglaím thú mar sin ní dhéanfaidh tú aon dochar. Toghairim thú agus déanaim ceangal ort leis an domhan scátháin seo. Anseo beidh tú agus fanfaidh tú anseo. Ghlaoigh na déithe thú uair amháin, agus bhí siad gafa uair amháin eile. Glaoim ort agus ceanglaím thú san áit seo agus ag an uair seo. Déanaim toghairm ort agus ceanglaím thú mar sin ní dhéanfaidh tú aon dochar. Toghairim thú agus déanaim ceangal ort leis an domhan scátháin seo. Anseo beidh tú agus fanfaidh tú anseo. Ghlaoigh na déithe thú uair amháin, agus bhí siad gafa uair amháin eile.”_

Plover and Everett’s bodies appeared to grow heavier, pushed down and down into the floor, into the void of the mirror library. Eliot’s body stayed still, though Julia wounds seemed to be healing. She gasped and her eyes glowed a bright yellow as she opened them. Quentin held a hand out to help Julia up, and Josh and Margo grabbed Eliot’s prone form. They all hastened back through the mirror, barely daring to hope they’d make it out before the monsters found some way out of the trap. As soon as everyone was through, Penny grabbed one of the heaviest books from Zelda’s office, and with a single swing, smashed the mirror, trapping the monsters and their hosts in the mirror world. Julia held a quick hand over Eliot, healing his ax wounds enough that he’d be stable enough to make it back to Earth.

“Are you coming?” Quentin asked when he noticed Zelda hang back while everyone else was quickly rushing out of the building.

“With Everett gone, we need a new Head Librarian. I’ve been waiting for this moment for centuries,” she informed him. “And someone has to root out everyone Everett had involved in his schemes.”

Hedges and magicians alike gathered outside of the Neitherlands library, clasped hands, and Penny blipped them all homeward.

*

The first thing Eliot says when he comes to, after a re-powered up Julia heals him, is, “What the fuck am I wearing?! Is this a graphic tee? Bambi, tell me this isn’t a graphic tee with a pun. I know the monster used my body for horrible things, but this is a crime against fashion.” He groaned, but the corners of his mouth turned up when Margo gave him a full-body hug. Fen let out a squeak and jumped up to join the hug pile. Eliot turned his head, searching for the brown eyes into whose depths he’d spent years drowning, but Quentin’s head was bowed, and he seemed to be slowly backing out of the room. After a few moments, Eliot sat up, groaning again. 

Rising from his body, Margo stepped back. “Can you walk?” Eliot nodden tentatively. “Because honey you stink. I don’t think the Monster ever took a shower.”

“How long was I out?” he asked.

“Way too fucking long.”

Eliot scanned the room. The only familiar sights were the people gathered around him. “Where the fuck are we?”

Kady’s voice surprised him. “We’re kinda subletting from Marina.” She turned to point at a door to Eliot’s left. “Bathroom’s through there.”

“Bless you,” he purred. “I don’t suppose I have any other clothes here, huh Bambi.”

Margo brushed a hand over his stubbly cheek. “Take a shower and I’ll grab some things for you.” She reached into his back pocket, searching for, well, Nigel’s wallet actually, and made a happy sound when she found a stack of credit cards. “You’re probably starving. Josh?”

“I’ll get cooking,” Josh volunteered.

*

It had been a week. Eliot was back, Julia was back, magic was back. Alice was gone. But aside from group functions in the apartment, Quentin wouldn’t stay in the same room as Eliot, and people were beginning to notice. After checking in half a dozen rooms in the apartment, Margo opened the door to Quentin’s closet to finally find him sitting in the dark, stretching his fingers and flapping his hands. She squatted down to get in his line of sight. “A closet? Really? Dude, it’s not a secret.” Her tone was soft, despite the harsh words.

“We got him back, Margo. We got him back, and… and… and I should be happy, you know? I am happy. So why is my brain still this broken?” His voice was thready and sounded far away to him.

“Your brain’s not broken, Q. It just works differently.” She held out a hand to lift Quentin up. “Now go talk to him.”

*

Margo managed to get both Eliot and Quentin in the same room for dinner that night, a feat of manipulative and tactical genius if anyone had bothered to ask her opinion on the subject, but when she rose from the table, Quentin made his own excuses and tried to leave.

Eliot put a hand on Quentin’s shoulder as he walked past. “You can’t keep avoiding me, Q.”

He didn’t turn around. “I’m not avoiding you.” Quentin sighed.

“Then what are you doing? You won’t look at me. I know I did some horrible-”

“No,” Quentin cut in, angrily. “It wasn’t you. It was the Monster.” He took a breath. “That’s not what this is about.” Another pause. He stared at the potted plant on the side table. “That’s not what this is about. It’s about…” Q trailed off, then turned to face Eliot. “Did you mean it, that day in the park? Peaches and plums? Because you’re my best friend and you know me better than anyone in the universe, and I don’t want to fuck that up, but El. El.” Quentin sighed. “El. I want to give this a shot. And… and I’ve missed you. Missed us. And if you don’t want to define it, or put a label on it, or overthink it, that’s okay too, but god. You have to know that you’re my person. You’re not convenient. You’re not a lack of choices. You’re-”

“I’m in.” Eliot took a breath and reached out to gently pull Quentin’s head closer to his. Lips almost touching, he whispered into Q’s mouth, “I’m in.”

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote the spell in Google Translate, so it’s not gonna be super great, and it’s in Modern Irish instead of Ancient Irish/Gaelic so throw me your criticisms now and get it over with, okay? English translation, “I summon you and bind you in this place and at this hour. I summon you and bind you so you will do no harm. I summon you and bind you to this mirror world. Here you shall be and here shall you stay. Gods trapped you once, and trapped once more you are.” And yeah, Mayakovsky’s Russian so would probably give them something in Russian, but with the bit we know about the Monster, I thought some Irish might make things more personal.
> 
> The title is a reference to the No Doubt song, for no particular reason other than it made sense in my head at the time.


End file.
